Nayia Yiakoumaki

Nayia Yiakoumaki is an artist and curator. She lives and works in London. She is archive curator at the Whitechapel Gallery, London and has recently curated the exhibition John Latham’s Anarchive , which focuses on the work and personal archive of the British artist, John Latham (1921-2006) and This is Tomorrow, an experiment in collaboration instigated by the Independent Group, a diverse group of artists who worked in England in the 1950s. She was recently awarded a PhD from the Art Department, Curating, Goldsmiths, University of London, for her thesis Curating Archives, Archiving Curating examines archives as a curatorial ground.

‘Our society should no longer tolerate a status quo that perpetuates a permanent underclass of persons and benefits from their labor without offering them legal protections.’

‘At night, when the mills poured out their operatives, the poor, scared Greeks would gather twenty or so together, take the middle of the street and in close formation rush to Market Street, where they scattered to their lodgings like frightened sparrows and dared not stir out till morning.’

‘I went to the aliens bureau in Petrou Rally street. when I got there at the crack of dawn one Saturday a few months ago the only thing I could see were thousands of heads. It was raining and the police kept on hitting us with clubs and shouting at us to sit down.’

English version

See what I’m saying

The project See what I’m saying commences from Patras as an assumed passage of migrants. It culminates with an archive that is shaped and distributed via a visual context in a public place emphasising thus, the capacity of archives to blend data.

The temporariness of immigrants in Patras, a city-harbour, does not give time to the passing visitor or the permanent resident to come to terms with one another nor to exchange any real experience.

At the same time, the ‘transient’ and insecure situation of illegal immigrants imposes on them certain routes within the city which conceal them from the main cityscape. Simultaneously, the ostensible appearance of the permanent residents and their ‘primacy’ in the city is perceived as authoritarian.

The voice of both sides is delivered and channelled through concrete means. The migrants’ right to be heard is communicated through personal records such as diaries, testimonies of colleagues, or is delivered by the stereotypically expressed views of humanitarian organizations and journalists whilst permanent residents’ say is expressed through daily discussions or as an offensive racist comment with people from their local environment. On both occasions, both sides’ personal accounts and opinions, especially the ones that involve and reflect experiences from the co-existence with one another, are rarely disclosed.

See what I’m saying publicises and comments on the manner in which these fragments of speech from both sides relate to racism while pointing to the permanent residents, the precarious situation of migrants and the undoubted fact that part of the Greeks’ national identity is also marked by their own immigrant past.

Creation of the archive

See what I’m saying focuses on gathering statements from people who belong to (seemingly) conflicting groups in order to create an archive of reports and statements taken from three different sources:

Confessions and comments by migrants from Patras and other cities.
Confessions and comments for migrants by citizens of Patras.
Confessions and comments by Greek immigrants to America in the late 19th century.
The archive makes use of various historical sources which for mainly political reasons would not intermingle with one another. The basic structure is formed by the division into three categories which include the findings of the three main directions described above. The user of the archive will come across all the confessions and comments compiled into one text without knowing their origin; the archive provides the opportunity to investigate the origin of the confession/comment as well as the type of person who made it. (Immigrant, permanent resident or a Greek immigrant).

Dissemination / Use of public space

See What I’m Saying assumes that archive material in general is an important component of social space. The t-shirt is the most common informal piece of clothing, designed by the U.S. Navy it served as underwear for workers and especially manual workers. Since the 1980s, printed t-shirts are used as an advertising platform with different messages; simultaneously they’re associated with ‘personal expression’ bearing different slogans or other logos.

The archive is disclosed printed onto t-shirts which I selected as the most appropriate means of dissemination of otherwise buried ‘voices’.

The project See What I’m Saying uses this particular type of clothing as a main platform for the following reasons:

– It strengthens possibilities of using archival material as important components of social space, which in this way, occur in the public and give rise to further reflection and revision of stereotypical attitudes on racism, rather than it being preserved within the ‘protected’ site of an archive.

I wear a garment, I carry a message.

– Because the informality of this type of clothing makes it accessible to large groups of people from different social groups, political positions, nationalities and ages, thus facilitating on the one hand the cooperation of the public who would act as human billboard and on the other guaranteeing the immediate publication and distribution of these fragments of speech.

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About the project, April 2010

An archival dissemination in the public sphere.

The citizen as carrier of archival information.

The concealment of information.

The coincidental element of discovery in the archive.

The impossibility of total knowledge.

The archive as public and private.

The (actual or false) empowerment of the reader.

Mainstream situations as vehicle for art.

The artist’s authority over the archive.

A document or series of documents are selected from archives referring to or based in the city of Patra, Achaia, Greece. Some information is extracted by the artist, making thus a first intervention and consequently imposing a first ‘command’ on the archive. Consequently this extract is separated from its original contents, dissected even further and elements of it are printed in cheap, cotton T-Shirts which are distributed to the public or sold for a symbolic amount of 1-3 euros. Each owner of a T-Shirt now owns one part of the information and by wearing it and walking in the city of Patra, s/he becomes a messenger of some information but never of the whole. The project questions ideas around archives and information as well as the public and private nature of archives, the authorship and ownership.

The information is revealed if all the ‘messengers’ gather at the same place at the same time and by an impossible coincidence be placed in the right order to form the correct sentence.

About

Archive Public
A research art project.

Within the flexible limits of archival art today, Archive Public practices archival art as intervention in public space, questioning the dominant hegemony and allowing for possibilities of solidarity actions. It aspires to the creation of a broader productive collaboration network triggered by two theoretical research assumptions and an open body of works which tries out archival interventions in conflicting urban situations, in Patras and other european cities.

The first phase of the work developed theoretical propositions and art projects in Patras, Greece. It was realized with the support of the C. Carathéodory research program at the University of Patras. An edited volume, Archive Public. Performing Archives in Public Art. Τοpical Interpositions, documents this first phase of the project, and is available from Cube Art Editions.

The book includes theoretical hypotheses on archival practice in contemporary art, art works that were specifically created for the project, as well as an anthology of essays by contemporary thinkers who elaborate on particular issues of the archive in relation to the public sphere and theories of democracy, the notions of institution and instituting practice, interventions in the shifting urban condition, the philosophy and archaeology of media as well as the global flows of migration and media. Interventions focus on the urban and social condition of Patras, as it is influenced by a translocal dynamics which produces interrelations with other localities.

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This multiuser weblog has been set as a working, exhibition and archival platform for the participants, to actuate different forms of collaboration. We plan to bring together theoreticians and practitioners from different cities and localities who are working on similar issues of archiving and intervention in the public sphere. We are seeking projects and theoretical works relevant to the Archive Public topics, as well as feedback texts responding to the art projects as they develop.

To submit a text or a project, please write at archivepublic{at}upatras{dot}gr